They pronounce Versailles that way in Missouri, too. The S in Vincennes, Indiana gets pronounced, too. In fact, might Vinnie Sennes work equally well as your fabled manager?

It seems that with French-influenced place names, the easier a thing is to say for an American, the more likely it is to be pronounced that way. The vowel sounds in Des Moines and Illinois are distinctly un-French in spite of the silent s, after all.

we have had the Louisville pronunciation discussion before I believe IIRC any town name in KY/TN ending in "-ville" is pronounced to rhyme with the word "full"

I wasn't even thinking of the ville part! The Louis part is kind of between Loo and Loo-uh but the uh is so quick and smushed onto the Loo that it almost disappears in most native speakers (at least the ones I know). Anyone who says Loo-ee seems to be not from around here.

I went to college in two Indiana towns with French names: the aforementioned Vincennes, and Terre Haute. For Vincennes the interesting split among native Hoosiers is which syllable to accent. For bougies it tends to be the second, whereas for the hill folk it's always the first.

Pronunciation of Terre Haute has a similar class divide. People where I'm from tend to actually pronounce it closer to the French way, what with the dropping of the last 'e' in Terre and the glottalization/semi-glottalization of the 't' in Haute.

I just re-read pollo's post in that old Louisville thread, I remember I teared up when I read it the first time. Man what is it about that city that is so wonderful? I probably identify more with Terre Haute: home of Gene Debs, the only Real American. Bad labor town, ground down by decades of de-industrialization. etc. But there is in Louisville an indefinable rhythm of life that made me deeply ok with the inconsequence of my existence. I forget about that sometimes. I feel like you could just say the word 'Louisville' and my blood pressure would go down a little. If it were pronounced properly.

I keep forgetting that not everyone shares my pitilessly materialist view of culture. I always feel bad for making someone (usually a classmate) feel dumb for romanticizing something like a novel or record, when usually all I'm trying to say is that the impulse toward that romanticization needs more examination than probably the individual novel itself. But I do believe you need to have a very thick skin as a critic, up to and including the point of indifference toward others' indifference toward your own romanticizing impulses.

Just being women in male-dominated fields, we feel like ambassadors and we have to do a really good job. We have to not only make this great work, but we also have to instruct and educate. Iím trying to get away from that. In a way, I feel like it becomes more even more sexist, where Iím not just a musician making work; Iím everyoneís mom, cleaning up their fucking dirty dishes.

Lord do I identify with this today, esp the part after the semicolon. Though not in terms of work, just in terms of feeling, for no apparent reason, that I should stop having ideas about stuff that is seen as 'bad'--getting annoyed in detail about people using the word sheeple, for example. I enjoy being pissed off about it, and the work has been fun for me, but I feel like I should engage with material that I can go "hey people, isn't this awesome" about and be all cheery, as though being pissed off will make me a drag somehow. I think it's partly from being surrounded by political people who are all also ranty, and wanting to balance it out a bit, but also from some misguided idea that I should be up and help other people be up all the time when it's their life and their responsibility when interacting with me to help balance it. This uncertainty is coming from nowhere otherwise--no one has criticised me for being like this, and yet the random self-flagellation. Frustrate.

I am feeling very uncertain about what happened to one of our sausages (a mid-sized vaguely salami-like kind of sausage) that we left on our kitchen worktop to let it dry a little before transferring it to the fridge. We had two of them, lying next to each other on the counter, and now there is only one. We did leave the backdoor open for most of the afternoon and weren't around half of the time, so it is possible that a cat might have come in, but I have a hard time imagining a cat taking off with a whole sausage, and I do not see how anyone other than a cat would have come into our garden. We did have visitors (a couple and their daughter, aged two and a half), but I rather trust the grown-ups not to steal our sausage and I do not think the daughter would have been capable of reaching up to the counter on her own. (She was in the kitchen quite a bit, but usually accompanied by her mother.) Puzzling.

I am feeling very uncertain about what happened to one of our sausages (a mid-sized vaguely salami-like kind of sausage) that we left on our kitchen worktop to let it dry a little before transferring it to the fridge. We had two of them, lying next to each other on the counter, and now there is only one. We did leave the backdoor open for most of the afternoon and weren't around half of the time, so it is possible that a cat might have come in, but I have a hard time imagining a cat taking off with a whole sausage, and I do not see how anyone other than a cat would have come into our garden. We did have visitors (a couple and their daughter, aged two and a half), but I rather trust the grown-ups not to steal our sausage and I do not think the daughter would have been capable of reaching up to the counter on her own. (She was in the kitchen quite a bit, but usually accompanied by her mother.) Puzzling.

Strange. There's this sausage out of nowhere sitting on our cutting board.

Part of the reason I posted it was I was curious whether some of you guys do think that a cat might be responsible, I admit. The reason I was hesitant is partly that it's a fairly large and heavy sausage by cat standards, and partly that it's the kind that doesn't have an edible skin, so I wasn't even sure it would register as foodstuff to a cat at all. But I guess it is the likeliest explanation at this point. So thanks for the input!